I’m moving towards a 100% American made lifestyle when it comes to things I buy, wear and consume. It is the natural trajectory of sustainability – a call out to a return to bioregional economies. There are plenty of international, culturally-based things I love and am glad to keep consuming, I’m not talking about those things; I’m talking about systems of cost and exploitation, outsourcing and decentralizing – the general cheapening of craft, the hollowing of spirit. There is a retail movement afoot that resists this contemporary phenomenon that I think of as a multinational splaying of resources to deliver me, my what ever you will, be it anything made by hand. Traveling from downtown and then through the neighborhoods of north Los Angeles today, I find a number of amazingly well put together stores who display a matrix of merchandise that synergizes a reaction against this splay.

Shelter Half

Shelter Half

General Quarters

Unis

Otherwild

Wornpath’s jewelry at Otherwild

Poketo

Broome Street General Store

There is no political manifesto brewing here above what is or should be obvious: quality retail serves the community in a vast web – from not only the economic, but through to the aesthetic, the deeply beautiful, the proudly offered, and at long last – the artful.